


A Shot in the Dark

by purplebass



Category: The Last Hours Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25291000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplebass/pseuds/purplebass
Summary: “People can live for a hundred years without living a minute.”Jesse Blackthorn has been dead for seven years and his life is a colorless routine until one petite girl with blue eyes lights up his nights with her vivid soul.
Relationships: Jesse Blackthorn & Lucie Herondale, Jesse Blackthorn/Lucie Herondale
Kudos: 16
Collections: Blackdale





	A Shot in the Dark

What a beautiful night to stay alive.

If I were actually _alive_. Now I sound bitter. I’m sorry, but you probably don’t know that I’m a ghost, and I have been for long. During this time, the only people I could talk to were my sister and my mother, but they can’t be with me all the time. After all, since I am now a mere shade which disrupts the colors of my childhood house which is just like me, discoloring and decomposing like a corpse, I can only be visible when the sun goes down and everyone is already safe and dreaming under the comfort of their thick covers.

The dead never sleep, they vanish.

We are like darkness despite existing because of reflected light on our achromatic bodies. We dissipate when the sun rises and we reappear when our enemy, the light itself, evades the day. We long for the light. I long for the light. Even if I am able to do as I please and roam where I want to when it’s dark, sometimes it isn’t enough. It’s true that at night I can see, I can live. But what is a blind light for a shadow like me?

I can’t be helped. Death is the only thing which can’t be undone, and after spending the last seven years of my incorporeal life as the shadow of my former self, I accepted that I am to remain in this state for the rest of my existence in this universe, which is until this world ceases its own life.

 _Pulvis et umbra sumus._ We are dust and shadows.

That was what Horace wrote in his Odes, and that is what shadowhunters decided to use as one of their mottos. Isn’t it true, though? Especially when we die. I am the proof that despite I was fated to turn into dust after my body would be set on fire because I have stopped breathing, I am a shadow. A living shadow. Living, nonetheless, even if this can’t be considered life.

Lately, however, I am waiting for the nighttime. And you wonder, what could excite a ghost? Aren’t dead people without feeling? Aren’t dead people without a heart? Aren’t dead people… well, deceased?

It may shock you to know that ghosts, despite being very dead, are not disembodied specters. To some extent, we are still in this world and we see and hear things the living ignore. We roam silently through the streets, through the houses, and we have fun because it’s boring to be dead, but our feelings are very much present. When you die, it’s your body that fails. Not your soul. Your soul is very much attached to this world if no one bids it goodbye. And my soul is…

It’s complicated, but I’ll try to explain.

I didn’t mention that not only my mother and sister can see me. After giving up all hope to have a change in my daily routine, a change finally presented itself in front of my eyes, and it shifted the axis of my existence. My shadowy form rooted around the only family I had left until a few weeks ago, but now there is a new addition, which I would also define as my addiction because I just can’t get enough. The turning point to a routine marked by indistinguishable nights and days.

My current fixation has bright and light blue eyes and brown hair. She has a petite frame but she’s fierce, she is strong willed, she is adventurous. And she wants to do what my mother has tried to do in the last years since my death, which is not only against life itself, but against the rules of the world I was forbid to enter ever since I was a small child.

Lucie. _My_ Lucie. _My_ light.

It is ironic and also delusional on my part to think that there is a reason why she is the only other person in this universe who can see me, and who also represents what I crave but I can’t have. Whoever came up with her name was longsighted, because she truly is a light that can’t be put out. She is my beacon of hope. As much as I shouldn’t wish for things I cannot have. Considering I am but a haze in the midst of her vivid and intense life, I long for her color, for her sparkle. I am just a blanched speck in the course of her ordinary days, and, in spite of that, she sees and feels me. Which is… excruciating.

People can live for one hundred years without living a minute, until they realize that they have just barely survived all along but not legitimately thriving. I can relate to this. Because after the night I met her again, I started believing that perhaps there is a chance for me to be happy in this life, however short lived that is. However rare moments we may have. I have always tried to stay hidden not to let her see me, but I can’t do it anymore. I want… to be alive. I wished I was alive, so that I could wait for her outside of her home like any boy my age. And I want…

“Jesse? Are you here?”

I was too caught up in my thoughts that I didn’t hear her calling me. “Did something happen, Lucie?”

She was sitting behind her mahogany desk in her room, her hair was not in place and she looked tired as she passed a hand on her forehead. “Nothing,” she replied, then she gazed at me. I had appeared in front of her bed, and since we weren’t as close as I wished, I moved closer to her desk. “Would you mind listening to my ideas for The Beautiful Cordelia?”

I grinned as usual when she asked me ordinary things like that. “Sure, Lucie. Tell me about it,” I agreed, and sat on a chair nearby. “I always want to know about your stories.”

And then Lucie started talking. She told me about what she had in mind for the next chapters of her first book, and I listened, raptured, to her flowing of creative ideas, and I fell even more enamored with her, to the point of being embarrassed to hide my blush from her not to let her notice that I fancied her.

Then I remembered. I can’t blush. I can just glow under the light of the moon. I am devoid of color, and yet… as Lucie Herondale tells me about her plans for her manuscript, I can’t help but feel my faded body filled with hordes of hues.


End file.
